The question addressed is, when do disadvantaged-group members accept their situation, take individual action, or attempt to instigate collective action? Ss attempted to move from a low-status group into an advantaged, high-status group and were asked to respond to their subsequent rejection. Ss who believed that the high-status group was open to members of their group endorsed acceptance and individual actions. When access to the high-status group was restricted, even to the point of being almost closed (tokenism), Ss still preferred individual action. Disruptive forms of collective action were only favored by Ss who were told that the high-status group was completely closed to membersof their group. Ss who believed they were near to gaining entry into the high-status group favored individual protest, while Ss distant from entry were more likely to accept their position. The theoretical and societal implications of these findings are discussed.

To foster a more in-depth understanding of the psychological processes leading to terrorism, the author conceptualizes the terrorist act as the final step on a narrowing staircase. Although the vast majority of people, even when feeling deprived and unfairly treated, remain on the ground floor, some individuals climb up and are eventually recruited into terrorist organizations. These individuals believe they have no effective voice in society, are encouraged by leaders to displace aggression onto out-groups, and become socialized to see terrorist organizations as legitimate and out-group members as evil. The current policy of focusing on individuals already at the top of the staircase brings only short-term gains. The best long-term policy against terrorism is prevention, which is made possible by nourishing contextualized democracy on the ground floor.

Positioning theory opens up a new dimension in the psychology of interpersonal encounters, through explicit attention to the role of rights and duties in the management of action. People are positioned or position themselves with respect to rights and duties to act within evolving story-lines, and on the basis of claims about relevant personal attributes, the discursive process of prepositioning. Some recent applications of positioning theory are presented, ranging from simple interpersonal encounters, through positioning in a complex public but limited legal struggle, to the positioning techniques used to justify civilian causalities in warfare, to the analysis of examples of the discourses by which large-scale social entities position themselves in relation to others.

No abstract

The first consists of the United States, the second comprises the other developed nations, and the third is made up of the developing countries. The three worlds have unequal capacities for producing and disseminating psychological knowledge and for shaping psychology," the dominant power is the first world. The crisis in western socia ! psychology is reviewed and is interpreted as partly arising from an attempt by the second world to establish a distinct social psychology, independent of that of the United States. The movement toward a third-world psychology indicates a possible challenge to the domination of first-and second-world psychologies in third-worM societies.